Questions regarding openapi support in Rust web frameworks

help
1

I am about to start working on an HTTP service that has a hard requirement to have swagger/openapi support. I am familiar with Axum, and would have used it but unfortunately Axum has no support for openapi yet. See here

I checked other popular framework in the space: rocket, actix_web and warp and none of them have native openapi support.

I came across two third party library that provides the ability to bolt on openapi support regardless of the framework that is being used: Utopia GitHub - juhaku/utoipa: Simple, Fast, Code first and Compile time generated OpenAPI documentation for Rust and Aide GitHub - tamasfe/aide: An API documentation library but after evaluation I decided not to go with these two as it could make maintenance more problematic down the line.

The only framework I found that supported openapi natively was poem GitHub - poem-web/poem: A full-featured and easy-to-use web framework with the Rust programming language.

So I have two questions:

  • Are there other widely used framework out there, I might have missed that has native supports for openapi?
  • Has anyone seen or done benchmark for poem to compare it with the popular rust web frameworks? I can't seem to find anything on this, but it will be nice to see how poem compares in terms of performance before committing to it.
2

I did this search myself awhile back and didn't find anything. We ended up using utoipa, but since our existing webserver is Warp, we had to manually create everything, and maintenance has been difficult.

Sorry I couldn't give you better information.

3

Hey,

Author of GitHub - juhaku/utoipa: Simple, Fast, Code first and Compile time generated OpenAPI documentation for Rust here speaking :slight_smile:

Sorry to hear that maintenance has been difficult. Though as it drives to be general library which follows closely OpenAPI spec in terms of usability it might not be the most intuitive in all the aspects. Furthermore since it is compile time generated there are some limitations on what is possible.

If there is something that could be improved or you would wish to exists in the library please file an issue or open a discussion in the Github page :slight_smile: That is only by users feedback we can work through to make it even better and more ergonomic to use.

Though hardest part is to find a way to better integrate it with frameworks and how the warp is designed it is quite hard to make it seamless especially if traits are used as path operation handlers.